The role of colour in a successful logo.

This research is concerned with the role of aesthetics and its importance in the design and success of corporate logos. The specific interest is in visual aesthetics; that is, how the logo looks without reference to the context in which the logo is applied or the brand or company that it represents. Aspects of visual aesthetics includes colour and form. This study aims to ascertain the feature space in which consumers evaluate the visual appearance of logos and to determine the role and importance of colour in this feature space. In this work, therefore, a psychophysical scaling experiment is described to measure consumers’ responses to visual attributes of logos. A total of 50 logos were evaluated by 22 participants in terms of 10 visual attributes (complex,proportional, unique, familiar, memorable, colourful, feminine, bold, friendly and modern). During the experiment each participant was presented with one of the logos and asked to respond to each of the 10 attributes in turn. Responses were collected in the form of a 5-point Likert scale. Colourfulness was shown to have statistically significant positive correlations with the following attributes: friendly (p < 0.001), feminine (p < 0.001), bold (p =0.022), modern (p = 0.036), unique (p = 0.003) and memorable (p = 0.036). Correlations between other attributes were also found, suggesting that some reduction in dimensionality of the feature space may be possible using factor analysis.